Wiley & Sons to Make Supplementary Materials for TED Studies

John Wiley & Sons, Inc has announced a partnership with TED, a non-profit famous for its TEDTalks – presentations on wide range of topics covering ‘Ideas Worth Spreading’ – in order to create instructional materials to make it easier for teachers to integrate TEDTalks into their classroom coursework.

Wiley.com, together with other platforms such as iTunesU, will now play host to TED Studies — 21 collections of TED-created materials organized around single academic subject areas created in response to demands from educators to make TEDTalks easier to adopt to the academic environment. Wiley’s role will be to design instructional materials to go together with TED Studies to provide a comprehensive plan for any educator wishing to build lessons around them.

Commissioned from leading authors who are specialists in their academic and professional fields, the instructor materials developed for each TED Study will provide teachers with valuable curriculum content. Each set of instructor materials will include contextualizing essays, assignment questions and activities, key debates, experiments, and glossaries relating to the TEDTalks. Links to related content from Wiley and other publishers will be included for lecturers to share with students, or for lifelong learners to interact with directly.

“Our goal is to provide teachers with innovative, engaging resources that can be used to supplement curricula and bring lessons to life,” said Logan Smalley, Director of TED-Ed, TED’s education-focused initiative. “TED-Ed is committed to lessons worth sharing, and we are thrilled to offer these 21 collections as a new resource – particularly with the perspectives of highly regarded teachers and innovators from Wiley’s vast network.”

The best part is that both TED Studies and the accompanying materials designed by Wiley will be made available to teachers and educators online and for free.

Wiley has already rounded up a strong slate of authors to contribute their expertise including Professor Cary Cooper of Lancaster University’s Management School, who will be writing supplementary materials for TED Psychology: Understanding Happiness. Virginia’s College of William and Mary Professor Tamara Sonn will be contributing materials for TED Religion: Understanding Islam, while the TED Education: Creative Problem-Solving collection will make it easier for teachers to adopt insight contributed by Professors Jeff and Lisa Smith, both from the University of Otago.

There will also be contributions from the University of Oxford, the University of Missouri, American Public University and the University of Sheffield, among others.

“Our goal is to provide teachers with innovative, engaging resources that can be used to supplement curricula and bring lessons to life,” said Logan Smalley, Director of TED-Ed, TED’s education-focused initiative. “TED-Ed is committed to lessons worth sharing, and we are thrilled to offer these 21 collections as a new resource – particularly with the perspectives of highly regarded teachers and innovators from Wiley’s vast network.”